Regulation, not technology is holding back driverless cars

My dad works in the airplane industry and had an interesting story to tell me that relates to this. (I'm not sure exactly how accurate it is or what the source is, sorry). Apparently, it is illegal for pilots to read while flying. Even if they are heading in a straight line with no one around for miles. This is because one time an pilot wasn't paying attention and due to a series of software failures, the plane turned into a mountain. Interestingly, the plane was tuning at a very exact amount so that the number of Gs remained constant.<p>In any case, this single crash caused regulation to state that computers can never fly planes by themselves. This strikes me as rather unfair. If a single human crashed a plane, it does not make it illegal for humans to fly planes by themselves.<p>Another example is that in London, subways must be driven by a human. Even though driving a subway may be trivial (there is no way to steer), Londoners apparently do not feel comfortable being driven by a non-living thing. They want to be sure that if they die, the driver dies too, adding a level of accountability.<p>It seems that this sort of wide-spread mistrust of machines is driven more by socially normal paranoia than any kind of logic. I for one am rooting for machines to take over all forms of driving. There may be a few mishaps, but it will probably become hundreds of times safer eventually.

No surprises there.<p>The transition to driverless cars is (IMHO inevitable. At some point it will be cheap enough that the additional cost will pale in comparison to the lives that will be saved as well as the simple convenience of being able to do something else while commuting somewhere.<p>Likewise I see this kind of thing replacing many forms of public transportation. There will simply be a fleet of cars. You'll say where you want to go and some system will route people and cars to destinations.<p>But, the transition won't be quick or easy. You need look no further than the aviation industry to see why.<p>Basically, automation in modern aircraft is a double-edged sword. It seems to erode the ability of pilots to actually fly [1], software errors causing deaths [2] and (I can't find the link to this) I also read a study that in more automated planes, pilots are more likely to believe erroneous instruments rather than their own senses and experience.<p>The issue won't be how the car normally behaves because as demonstrations have shown, current systems require very little human intervention.<p>The issue will be extraordinary circumstances plus the huge liability problem of any errors.<p>Example: if someone runs a red light and causes a crash, killing someone, that person is responsible. If an automated car does the same thing, the manufacturer will be responsible.<p>That alone will impede adoption.<p>Instead I think you'll have what we already have: slowly adding automation to cars. Cars already have radars and can stop themselves from colliding, they can park themselves and so on.<p>But at some point the driver will need to go away and that will be a tremendously challenging leap forward for society.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.tourismandaviation.com/news-4530--Pilot_Reliance_on_Automation_Erodes_Skills_" rel="nofollow">http://www.tourismandaviation.com/news-4530--Pilot_Reliance_...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.77.html#subj6" rel="nofollow">http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.77.html#subj6</a>

Speed limits are another realm in which regulation can hold back the development of driverless cars, besides merely allowing them on the streets in the first place.<p>With computerized drivers, it will finally be possible to fully enforce speed limits, by introducing some ceiling to the speed attainable by the car. I'm sure some "well-meaning" legislator will make it his or her priority to ensure that speed limits are never exceeded. However, at least in Massachusetts, if you go on the highway, everyone (including police) drive at ~75 MPH even though the posted speed limit is 55 or 65 MPH. Few will buy a car with this kind of handicap, were it to exist -- and I worry that it will. Many speed limits in the US were imposed decades ago, with less safe and responsive cars -- it would be a pity if potentially revolutionary technology advances were thwarted by this fact.<p>Legislation has already crippled or made useless many useful automotive innovations. In the US, technologies that allow for adaptive cruise control (maintaining a distance to the car in front of you) can only decelerate the car, and not accelerate the car. This forces the driver to have to constantly accelerate, greatly reducing the effectiveness of this feature. Many computer-laden vehicles with navigation systems are similarly crippled -- they automatically "lock" when the car is in motion, and some (like in Lexus vehicles) cannot even be overridden by people sitting in the passenger seat... often causing unintended risks like drivers pulling over on busy highways just to readjust their GPS target.

The article doesn't make its case very well. The core problem people are presumably worried about is safety, and saying it they have a "good safety record" is hardly enough to reassure the senators, etc. who would presumably be responsible for relaxing restrictions.<p>For example, what about edge cases? Suppose the Google car does just fine in normal driving conditions, but in a blizzard w/ 26 mile per hour gusts of wind (as I drove in recently), or when a tractor trailer flips over on the road in front of you? Humans have a certain intuition that allows them to do bizarre twitches in extreme situations (even including supernormal strength) that presumably no machine intelligence will be able to approach for a long time (if ever).<p>Or what about the possibility of someone hacking the car? Could a worm engineered by some hostile government take millions of cars off the road -- or, worse, cause them all to steer into the median and cause mass damage and thousands of instant casualties?<p>It is, frankly, irresponsible not to consider edge cases like these when drafting legislation, and while I'm all for gradual introduction and more testing, the author of this article has convinced me that senators sitting on their hands not doing anything are probably acting on the interests of the people much more so than those who wish to simply hand over driving and navigation functions to machines as soon as possible.

I wonder if driverless cars could start out as a tool for people with disabilities. If such use were challenged, I can imagine the supreme court taking seriously a case by a person who is quadriplegic or blind demanding the right to use a self-driving car. If they can prove them safer, it will be hard to find a compelling government interest that could offset denying the use of this assistive technology.

One idea would be to make some long haul roads, or sections of them, completely driverless. Maine to Miami along a section of I95, or NYC to LA. We could start the test with tractor trailers. Let them drive for a few years and tune the system. There would be a huge economic benefit to allowing trucks to run 24x7 without drivers.

We don't need driveless cars, we need carless people:<p><a href="http://www.carfree.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.carfree.com/</a>

&#62;But it’s clear that in the early part of the 20th century, the original advent of the motor car was not impeded by anything like the current mélange of regulations, laws and lawsuits.<p>They did try in the 19th century though, at least in the UK, with the Locomotive Acts[1]. The way those laws went out of their way to protect the status quo (i.e. horse-powered transport) is an interesting parallell to today's possible transition from human-controlled to computer-controlled transport.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts</a>

Some things aren't brought into focus here.<p>(1) Off-highway driving happens. That means that the algorithms have to manage an uncontrolled environment where 'anything' can happen.<p>(2) It is very expensive to create bug-free software.<p>(3) You can't iterate by failing fast on life-critical systems after it is released. Failure means killing someone.<p>(4) Legal liabilities. It's not going to work to say something like, "This car's driver software is not warranted free from defects".<p>(5) Humans can manage situations utterly outside the norm; algorithms can not see beyond the vision of the designer.<p>I work in an industry which operates <i>below</i> the levels of software assurance that the medical/flight industries work at, and it is incredibly painstaking as it is. A fully automated car will be very expensive to build.<p>I am not a paranoiac regarding software. I am a paranoiac regarding software bugs and the limits of the software designers.

I suspect that this kind of "risky" technology will be deployed first in more adventurous countries, like China.

Regulation and fear are to be expected. The question is, what to do about them? I predict the largest PR campaign in the history of technology. Public opinion generally drives regulation. So less public fear will lead to less regulation.<p>While I have no way to prove it, I'd bet my right hand that Google's PR people made this story happen. I'd bet they also made the first NYT piece blowing up the Chauffeur project happen and they made it look serendipitous for authenticity. I think "The Suit is Back," and I think it's going to come back again and again.<p>Prediction: Driverless cars will be portrayed in a very positive way in a major motion picture within the next year.

This is the crux of the matter:<p>&#62; imagine that the cars would save many lives over all, but lead to some bad accidents when a car malfunctions. The evening news might show a “Terminator” car spinning out of control and killing a child. There could be demands to shut down the cars until just about every problem is solved. The lives saved by the cars would not be as visible as the lives lost, and therefore the law might thwart or delay what could be a very beneficial innovation.<p>It's otiose to point out that the premise of personal motor vehicles is <i>not</i> called into question every time a human driver spins out of control and kills someone.

I'm not sure I trust the underlying architectures that are being developed with my life...<p>DDOS and MITM attacks take a whole-new meaning if the networked entities are 3-ton objects moving at 65 mph.

Its possible to prove that driverless cars can be safe. And that's by keeping cars from having accidents. If safety systems can keep human drivers from having accidents by stopping vehicles before they can have an accident, they can do the same for robotic vehicles.<p>Such systems would place limits on how fast you could accelerate, turn the wheel or apply the brakes. And they would also brake for you when other vehicles, pedestrians and animals appear to be on a collision course.<p>Such systems will have to be proven in the real world. And we are starting to see them. The newest Mercedes have such features. I predict that full blown systems will dramatically lower accidents for older people, teenagers and those who drive under the influence. Eventually all new cars will have these systems.<p>And by then it will be a lot easier to trust the machines.

So much of technical progress happens through delivering most of the value of the previous solution at a fraction of the cost (email vs postal mail). Society seems to rule this kind of progress out for a few industries like health care, I assume something similar is happening here.

Ars Technica did a great series on the technology and economics of self driving cars a few years ago:<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/future-of-driving-part-1.ars" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/future-of-driving...</a>

A somewhat similar note put very nicely by James May from Top Gear;<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS0IxnxwJSU" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS0IxnxwJSU</a>

Perhaps it's because software has an obvious history of being buggy. A web service won't be down for a while if this fails, hundreds of lives being at risk on a 24 hour a day basis. Maybe a little wait-and-see is a reasoned approach for a complex interactive dynamical system like this?

"There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005."<p>Can we stop calling all motor vehicle crashes accidents. If the driver was drunk or purposely distracted it is NO more an accident than if I was randomly firing a gun hoping no one got hit.

Maybe we just need to emphasize the negative impact of long commutes. Suddenly you have that commute time to do something else. :)

<i>No state has anything close to a functioning system to inspect whether the computers in driverless cars are in good working order, much as we routinely test emissions and brake lights.</i><p>Having lived in Oregon, Arizona, and California, I have never had anything other than emissions routinely inspected. Demonstrate a car smart enough to monitor its own brake pad wear, alert on burnt out bulbs, and provide a clear readout of all detected issues (i.e. not a coded blinking service light, or plug interface) before you start trying to make it drive itself.<p>(I do love the idea of an automated train of cars, and driving my drunk self home, though)